


Double-O Bear

by SpaceCadetDHD



Series: The Frankenteddy Chronicles [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Fluff and Crack, For Science!, M/M, McShep fluff, POV John Sheppard, Rodney McKay can make anything work, Sleepy Cuddles, Slice of Life, Stuffed Toys, Team Fluff, creative expressions of shippyness, date nights interrupted, references to DADT
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 17:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28657053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceCadetDHD/pseuds/SpaceCadetDHD
Summary: John keeps running into Frankenteddy. Apparently Rodney has plans for his birthday gift that extend beyond remote control cars.
Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Series: The Frankenteddy Chronicles [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2100186
Comments: 12
Kudos: 45





	Double-O Bear

**Author's Note:**

> I've been asked to keep writing more Frankenteddy adventures, so... More Frankenteddy Adventures!
> 
> Kudos again to pebbles1971 for beta help!
> 
> * * *

Movie nights were the closest thing to “dating” that John and Rodney were really allowed to do in the city, and even then it was like being a kid again, with a dozen chaperones around. They crammed in on the couch and kept their hands to themselves, but they got to be together, around other people, when they weren’t technically on the clock for work. 

Okay, it was a _really shitty_ date night. And it was technically John’s fault it had to be that way. He did like his job, and neither of them wanted to give Caldwell the loophole to kick him out of it. McKay understood that. He was fine with it. He liked movie night _dates_. He mostly liked everyone in attendance. There was popcorn. 

So it was definitely weird when everyone except Rodney showed up in the rec-hall for movie night. John made an excuse about a forgotten requisition form needing a signature before a made-up deadline and disappeared before the movie had been picked out of the list on the network. There was no sense voting if he wasn’t sticking around to watch the choice. Dedicated to his cover story, though, he went back to his apartment to pick up his tablet. Then he went to look for his favorite missing scientist.

Rodney’s door opened quickly enough, with the man himself on the other side of it looking no worse for wear.

“Oh. Colonel. What-”

“You skipped out on movie night,” John replied, trying to cut casually into the man’s distracted thought process. Rodney blinked at him, checked his watch.

“Oh...”

“Yep.”

“I get distracted. I thought that was yesterday-”

John nodded, shrugged at him. “A whole week of yesterdays, yep. Today was a brand new one.”

“Ha. Funny,” replied Rodney, sounding more cranky than amused. All the same, he let John in and closed the door. John swiped at the crystals and willed the locks to catch, just in case someone else went looking for why Rodney didn’t show up. They could have date night at McKay’s just as easily as anywhere else, as long as no one had their heart set on popcorn. Rodney didn’t seem to mind, as he bussed a welcoming kiss to John’s jaw, when the doors were secure, and then went right back to whatever he was doing before they had opened.

Which, apparently, was a full-on bear lobotomy.

“What the hell-”

John stood next to Rodney at the man’s desk and looked down at scraps of ripped up security uniforms and dried rice and beans, spilled out everywhere. It appeared to be just the head; the body sat on the back of the desk, missing the head, still mostly perched on Frankenteddy the bear’s customized RC car.

“Oh! John! Look-” Rodney held up one of the ears John had so carefully stitched up. Now it was removed from the head and had been attached to a tiny mic from a sacrificed headset radio. It looked like the bear ear had grown metal roots.

“Rodney... what did you do to Frankenteddy?”

“I’m making him a robot!”

Okay... that _sounded_ kinda cool. John picked up another piece and discovered a small speaker had been sewn into the part of the head where John had stitched a little black tongue under the nose rather than try to hand-stitch a bear-mouth-smile that looked even on both sides. The tongue was still there to give everyone a sassy raspberry, but it now hid a speaker. So Frankenteddy could be used as a radio: he could listen and talk back.

“Gonna give him eyes, too?” John asked, amused.

“I could. I should do that while I’ve got him torn apart, huh? Otherwise I’ll get the idea later and have to do this all over,” Rodney said, reasonably. John picked up the shell of the bear head, scrunched his nose at the wires sticking out of it.

“The name’s Teddy, Franken Teddy,” John said in his best heavy Scottish accent. “Double-O Bear.”

Rodney stared at him, not at all swayed and slightly territorial. “That was terrible. Please never do that again.”

Rolling his eyes at the familiar frustration, John set the scientist’s newest experiment back down on the desk. “What? You’re making him a little rolling spy-mobile.”

“Messenger bear, _not_ a spy.”

“Right. You gonna boost the RC range then?”

“Something like that.”

John waited but there was no further explanation. Apparently Rodney was keeping the bear upgrades close to the vest. _Huh_. John stuck his hands in his pockets rather than get in trouble for touching the science project again and _thwapped_ lightly at Rodney's arm with his elbow. “We gonna skip date night for bear lobotomy? Or finish up later?”

“Oh. Right. Later is good.”

John felt a little bad about the patient being left with all his parts hanging out all over the desk. But not bad enough to skip out on curling up next to Rodney to watch Monty Python. He fell asleep halfway through, but it was still worth it. Rodney kept him cuddled close and let him rest a few hours. He woke up to _the Pink Panther_ , of course, because McKay’s brain was mapping out a spy-bear. They watched the end of it together before it got late enough that John had to get back to his own rooms.

“Sorry I fell asleep on you,” he said, scrubbing at his sleepy face as he tried to wake up.

“Pretty sure I let you do it,” said Rodney. Sheppard kissed him for the understanding and then again because he wanted to. He left a few minutes later, looking rumpled, and nearly forgot to take home the tablet he had been so careful to arrive with.

The next time John saw Frankenteddy, he was a changed bear. Not only did he have a microphone hidden in each ear, the stone button eyes gleamed a little brighter because one of them had been replaced with a dime-sized camera lens. The speaker had completely disappeared behind the black tongue, and miracle of miracles, his too-long leg had been shortened to match. He still held on to the fake steering wheel, maybe a little more securely even, like he had a skeleton of sorts keeping all the beans and rice fluff in one place a little better. At least his insides weren’t spread out on the desk like a massacred mess anymore.

The truly curious thing, however, was that Frankenteddy sat, unsupervised, in front of John as he sat at his desk in his office. There was no Rodney lurking fifteen feet away with the remote control. The wheels buzzed back and forth, the bear sitting on an otherwise silent car. If he had to guess, Frankenteddy had gotten a data crystal motherboard upgrade just like John’s Baby Dart. 

“Oh god... tell me you didn’t cannibalize Baby Dart for Frankenteddy’s car,” John said out loud.

“Only a little,” came Rodney’s voice from the bear, crystal clear. “I can fix it later.”

“You’d better.” John realized he was talking to a bear and looked around self-consciously. “Where are you?”

“The lab,” said the bear.

John stared at Frankenteddy in open disbelief.

“Frankenteddy climbs stairs?”

“The small ones. I gotta wait till one of the recon robots need an upgrade so I can steal the bigger wheels. For now, he just takes the long way. There are ramps, most places,” said Rodney.

“Where I come from, big-ass tires mean you’re compensating for other parts,” John taunted. The bear buzzed forward and rammed his boots. 

“You’re welcome to investigate that stupid theory any time.”

There was a particular dissonance to that invitation in Rodney’s voice coming from a scrappy bear. John was caught somewhere between a smile and choking and he looked up at the door of his office to think it closed.

“Okay, first of all, you’re blushing. That’s adorable. You should know that,” Rodney’s voice informed him from the little tinny speaker. “And second, I haven’t figured out the door thing yet, so you have to let me out.”

“That is exactly why it got closed. Where’s the volume control on the bear?” asked John.

“Okay, fine. I’ll behave. But you started it,” said the bear.

John glared down at the bear at his boot. “I have reports to get done-”

The car rammed into him again. “Then let me out.”

Unimpressed by the threat, Sheppard turned his attention to his tablet. “Make me.”

The bear crashed into the side of his ankle again. John kicked his feet up onto the edge of his desk and reclined comfortably out of the bear’s reach. Frankenteddy went still, waited in little-bear frustration, and then buzzed around the desk a few times, the only sound being the tires on the smooth slate floor. After a minute, Frankenteddy settled somewhere under the desk and John settled in to pretend to ignore it. Then Rodney’s voice pinged up from below.

“Oh. I’m good with this view.”

“Jeezus christ, Rodney,” John muttered. But he didn’t fix his sideways slouch in the chair and let the bear sit there and enjoy whatever the man behind the controls had found to stare at. 

A week later, it was John who missed movie night. 

AR-1 went out to M46-something-or-other, one of the friendly trading planets, to supervise a crew of botanists that wanted to collect from a very colorful forest. High humidity, blue-green and fern like leaves on nearly every branch and stem, and many different kinds of bright, flowering plants. Rodney was absolutely miserable from his allergies.

"This was a bad idea," McKay said, grumbling through a stuffy nose. John bumped into him with his shoulder, watching his face with open concern.

"Yeah, maybe you should have stayed home," he agreed. "Botany trips aren't exactly your area."

"I'm not here with them," Rodney replied. He was talking to his tablet, but Sheppard smiled at him anyway for it, because he was apparently a sap. 

"Nah. So let's see what's out on the perimeter then. Get away from the big plants," John suggested. He aimed for what looked like brighter, open areas, that might be less cloyed with scents and held the promise of fresh air. When the trail dropped down to just big enough for one, he stepped behind Rodney and set his hand on the man's shoulder to steer him around. Rodney complained about the inherent unfairness of histamine responses the entire time. But they did eventually get to an elevated area, not far from the rest of their party, where Rodney could breathe a little easier.

"What are they looking for with those plants, anyway?" John asked as they made it to a wide area and he could walk alongside again. Rodney shrugged.

"Some theory on alternative medicinal properties," he said.

At the time, it had earned a raised eyebrow, but later John became pretty sure the plants the nerds were investigating were some kind of hallucinogenic. A pretty big clue being that when he brushed up against the pollen being collected, he almost immediately started seeing funny colors. 

Of course, the botanists had gloves and masks, but John hadn’t planned on getting a face full of flower stamen. He missed a step over the leaves and fern-covered hill and went sliding fifteen feet almost straight down, slammed himself into every possible rock and tree on the way. Just to land face-first in a lily flower larger than his head, inhaling purple powder that probably wasn’t smart. He discovered a new color range in his personal visual spectrum while he was tripping out for the next few hours after that. 

Sheppard woke up back in Atlantis, hung-over and confused. He also had an assortment of bruises, cuts, stitches, and a couple broken ribs. When he was sober enough to get the full list, Carson informed him he wasn’t leaving for a few days until he was absolutely certain everything had cleared his system, and John groggily agreed that was a great idea. He was fairly certain he saw a blue and black bear staring at him from the shelf along the wall a few feet away, but, given that he had been high as a kite for an uncertain number of hours, John declined to ask. 

He was a little concerned he had said things he shouldn't have while he was out of his mind, but he was definitely not going to ask about that. _Don't ask, don't tell_ worked in his favor, for once, because Dr. Beckett couldn't tell anyone anything, and John was afraid to ask if he had said anything even worth the gossip. 

His team visited him a few times, that he could remember, and Elizabeth and Lorne checked in on him. By the time John was fully sober again, the suspicion that Frankenteddy was watching him was gone, because he could clearly see the shelf, and there was no bear on an RC car on it. 

John was out of his mind bored, but he was also quite aware of the five-inch cut across his side from the alien tree that had tried to disembowel him a few days before, so he wasn't in a great hurry to walk around much, either. He didn't complain at the brief company when Teyla stopped by on her way to the rec hall for movie night, to check on him and bring him a tablet. He decided movie night could wait another week so he could get some of the bruising to fade, make sure that his insides were actually going to stay there permanently.

"Yes, we agree," said Teyla. That was when she passed the tablet to John. "And Rodney asked me to bring you this."

"Okay... well, tell him thanks for me," replied John. He had to be careful not to set the tablet on the wrong side of his body, but it would be a help in curing his boredom. Teyla squeezed his hand before excusing herself to go watch the movie. 

Once she was gone, John started fussing with the tablet and found it was already powered on, just in sleep-mode. When he woke it up, the tablet showed a weird program John hadn't seen before. The screen looked like a video game controller, with directional buttons in the lower corners, function settings in the middle, and a photo-image of a wall and door frame on the top two-thirds. He poked at the touch-screen controls and the camera moved around to show a slightly different view than the wall. 

"Oh, no way!" John muttered as he realized what he was playing with. It had to be Frankenteddy. 

He toyed around with the buttons until he could figure out how to move the RC car using the touch-screen buttons instead of the plastic, 3D kind he was used to. The car turned around in a big arch, and John realized _he_ was controlling the car, despite the fact that it was entire floors away from him, down on the level they used as a recreation hall. 

People had gathered for movie night, as usual, and he watched on the screen as Teyla and her bowl of popcorn crossed the room, picking her way between people camped out on the floor with pillows and their own snacks. She moved over to sit cross-legged on the couch to take up the space of two people between Rodney and Ronon. Because that was apparently, _officially_ , AR-1's couch, and Teyla was apparently feeling a _little_ territorial. There were other chairs, nobody would cause a fuss.

John practiced moving the car around a little more before he tried sending it through the minefield of people. He got the hang of it and heard a few kids giggling through the speakers on the tablet as the car _whirred_ by.

"Colonel Sheppard said thank you for the tablet," he heard Teyla say to Rodney, quieter than the other buzz of noise in the room. And just to back up her words, John happily rammed the car into Rodney's ankle, because revenge was healthy and healing, and he was stuck in the infirmary watching his friends have movie night without him.

"He's welcome," Rodney said over the speakers. Then he reached down and the camera spun around and wobbled as he picked up the car. Suddenly Frankenteddy's spy-eye was facing the screen on the wall across the room. There were a handful of people spaced out along the floor, but none of them in the way. The music started up and John smiled. He snagged one of his pillows, put it over his aching and beat-up ribs to protect them, and leaned the tablet against it to prop it up. Then he settled in to watch _The Empire Strikes Back_ with everyone. 

Apparently Rodney didn't want him to miss out on date night, infirmary notwithstanding. Frankenteddy seemed happy enough to oblige.

~*the end*~


End file.
